China

Fifth Generation: Who is Li Keqiang?

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This is the sixth in a series of posts examining the Chinese leaders named to the Politburo Standing Committee during the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党) that concluded November 14.  Prior installments on Zhang Gaoli here, Zhang Dejiang here, Liu Yunshan here, Yu Zhengsheng here and Wang Qishan here.

Unless something incredibly drastic happens in the coming months, Li Keqiang (李克强) seems likely to succeed Wen Jiabao (温家宝) as the premier of the government of the People’s Republic of China at the opening of the 12th People’s National Congress in March 2013. 

Along with China’s presumptive new ‘paramount leader,’ Xi Jinping (习近平), Li is one of just two of the previous nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee who remain on the committee after this week’s Congress, which concluded Wednesday.  In addition to Xi and Li, five new members joined the committee (although all are over age 64, hardly making them ‘new’).

After today, however, Li is essentially the second-most important government official in all of China, and he is expected to be a cautious reformer who’s keen on narrowing economic inequality in China and widening the social safety net.

Li, as noted, has been a member of the Politburo Standing Committee since 2007 and he’s been the PRC’s executive vice premier since 2007 as well.  He is also the youngest member, at age 57, on the committee.

He was a Party secretary in Liaoning, a province of 43 million people, that borders North Korea, from 2004 to 2007, spearheading a campaign to revitalize China’s northeast.

Previously, he served as the governor and the Party’s vice secretary of Henan province, China’s third most-populous province in the east-central heartland of the country with 94 million people, and one of the largest provincial economies in the country.  Although Henan province’s economy grew during Li’s tenure (indeed, with an emphasis on agricultural modernization that saw rural growth exceed already-high levels of province-wide growth), he also presided over a mini-scandal involving the contamination of blood that may have infected up to one million people with HIV.

A BBC profile notes that Li has attacked corruption that has plagued the Chinese government:

A US diplomatic cable released by whistle-blowing website Wikileaks described Mr Li as “engaging and well-informed”.

In a private conversation with the US ambassador in 2007, he called China’s economic figures “unreliable” and warned that official corruption was the biggest cause of public resentment, according to the leaked cables.

That puts him at odds with Wen, whose family allegedly holds over $2.7 million assets, as reported in the past weeks by The New York Times.  Hu’s speech kicking off the congress, too, emphasized the need to stem corruption in China’s official ranks.

Unlike many of the newly appointed members of the Politburo Standing Committee who are protégés of former president Jiang Zemin (江泽民), however, Li is more a protégé of outgoing current president Hu Jintao (胡锦涛), whom he encountered in the leadership of the Party’s youth league in the 1980s.  With Hu stepping back from active government, however, Li may have few natural allies with a relatively older and conservative group now comprising the Politburo Standing Committee.

Cheng Li, director of research and a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center, surmises that although Li lacks Wen’s political charisma, he may well be central to many key policy issues over the next decade:

Based on his previous work and the populist policy agenda he shares with his mentor Hu Jintao, Li’s hot-button policy issues will include increasing employment, offering more affordable housing, providing basic health care, balancing regional development, and promoting innovation in clean energy technology.

Interestingly, Li’s wife, Cheng Hong, is a professor of English language and literature in Beijing, and Li himself is fluent in English, just as fellow Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Qishan.

Like Xi, he spent time during the Cultural Revolution working in rural China, on a farm, and like Xi, Li also has a doctorate — in Li’s case, in economics.

China

It’s official: China’s new Politburo Standing Committee

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As predicted last week: the new Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party is as follows: 

  • Xi Jinping (习近平), who is expected to become the president of the People’s Republic of China, the general secretary of the Party and ‘paramount leader’, and a ‘princeling’ whose father was a Party dignitary;
  • Li Keqiang (李克强), who is expected to become premier;
  • Zhang Dejiang (张德江), a longtime hand who has served as Party secretary in Guangdong province and most recently, replaced disgraced Party figure Bo Xilai as Party secretary in Chongqing municipality — and also a ‘princeling’;
  • Yu Zhengsheng (俞正声), Party secretary in Shanghai municipality and a princeling as well;
  • Liu Yunshan (刘云山), director of the Party’s propaganda department (i.e., in charge of censorship and Internet restriction as well);
  • Wang Qishan (王岐山), a vice premier for economic, energy and financial affairs, and expected to play a major, reformist role in economic policy in Xi’s government; and
  • Zhang Gaoli (张高丽), currently the Party secretary of Tianjin municipality, and a former official in Shenzhen’s special economic zone.
 Suffragio‘s profiles of Xi and Li will come shortly, but in the meanwhile, you can read all about the five new members by clicking the links above.

The Politburo Standing Committee has been reduced from nine members to just seven.  Interestingly, the five new members (Xi and Li were already members) are relatively old — and so old that they will not be eligible for re-appointment in 2017 at the next National Congress because each will be older than the 67-year age limit for members of the committee.

Both Zhang Gaoli and Zhang Dejiang, as well as Yu Zhengsheng are firmly protégés of former president Jiang Zemin (江泽民), who preceded current president Hu Jintao (胡锦涛), who is stepping down to make way for Xi.

Left out are two key Hu allies: Li Yuanchao, currently director of the Party’s organization department, and Wang Yang, Party secretary in Guangdong province and perhaps the most notable advocate for political reform.

Liu Yandong, the only woman serving on the Politburo, also failed to make the cut.

As has been predicted in recent days, Xi will become the general secretary of the Party and will also immediately assume the chairmanship of the CPC Central Military Commission.

Xi is currently speaking to the press now, and his speaking style surely seems much more relaxed and expressive than Hu’s.

Israel, Palestine

Today’s attack in Gaza and its effect on Israeli (and Middle Eastern) politics

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First and foremost, it bears noting that civilians — including women and children — died today in Israel’s air strikes on Gaza and, whatever the merits, motivations or repercussions of that attack, our hearts — Jewish, Muslim, Christian, agnostic or otherwise — should cry for the loss of innocents in any military operation.

One of the motivating factors of my blog is to demonstrate that in so many places in the world, with so many viewpoints and cultural assumptions and worldviews, politics is a way of brokering policy decisions in a way that avoids violence — even in countries without democratic institutions or even much in the way of rule of law. 

So from that perspective, even if you think the world is a better place without Hamas’s Ahmed Jabari, who was killed in Israel’s attack today, it’s incredibly sad to see the continued failure of politics vis-a-vis Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

* * * * *

I have no interest in assigning blame in a conflict where both sides have used too much violence for far too long, despite strong and honestly held beliefs, and I have no idea how today’s Israeli attack on Gaza will play out (but I have a sad hunch), but it’s safe to say that with just over two months to go until Israel’s election campaign, it’s suspicious to see this kind of a wide attack on Gaza, the worst of its kind since Israel entered the Gaza Strip four years ago.

Even giving Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu the benefit of the doubt, today’s attack is bound to affect the election, scheduled for January 22.

Certainly, it helps Netanyahu’s reelection campaign, and it does so at a critical time when former Kadima leader Tzipi Livni and former prime minister Ehud Olmert were set to make a final decision about whether they would participate in the January 22 elections for the Knesset, Israeli’s unicameral parliament, and at a time when his Likud (הַלִּכּוּד‎) party’s formal 2013 election coalition with Yisrael Beitenu (ישראל ביתנו‎) has resulted in the jointly-merged coalition losing strength, not gaining.  As individual parties a month ago, they polled 40% to 45% cumulatively; the most recent poll shows Likud-Yisrael Beitenu at 36%, with their main rivals gaining — the Labor Party (מפלגת העבודה הישראלית‎) under Shelly Yachimovich polling 21%, and a new political party, Yesh Atid (יש עתיד‎) under popular former broadcaster Yair Lapid polling 15%.

We don’t know what exactly it means for Mohammed Morsi, the newly elected president of Egypt, only consolidating the reins of power in the Arab world’s largest country.  But Egypt has already recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv, and Morsi’s aides are working to revise the 1979 peace treaty with Israel.  Morsi was the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate during the presidential campaign.

The attack also puts the United States — and president Barack Obama, just eight days after his reelection — in a tougher spot than it would prefer.  Can you imagine what a Camp David-like peace accord would look like today, with Netanyahu on one side, Morsi on the other, who knows who would represent Hamas, and Obama and U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton trying to sort it all?

As Jeffrey Goldberg notes in real time in his blog at The Atlantic: Continue reading Today’s attack in Gaza and its effect on Israeli (and Middle Eastern) politics →

Assorted Links

First Past the Post: November 14

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Independent South Korean presidential candidate Ahn Cheol-soo has ended talks with Democratic United Party nominee Moon Jae-in for a single merged candidacy.

Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte defends his newly-empowered government coalition.

A neo-Nazi party in Germany is taking its fight to the constitutional court.

NATO’s chief met with Georgian prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili.

The Ghanian campaign season is heating up.

Pauline Marois and the Parti Québécois survived six confidence votes Wednesday.

FT Alphaville checks in on Portugal, post-Merkel visit.

Opinion on the recent Buenos Aires protests against Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Japan

Japan heads to snap elections on December 16

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Sooner than expected, Japan is headed to the polls: prime minister Yoshihiko Noda (pictured above) announced today that he will dissolve Japan’s lower house of parliament, the Diet, on Friday, clearing the way for snap elections on December 16.

It seems very likely that the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP, or 自由民主党, Jiyū-Minshutō), which controlled the Diet from 1955 to 2009, will return to power, and former Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe (安倍 晋三), who served exactly one year as prime minister from 2006 to 2007, seems likely to return for a rare second stint leading Japan’s government following his selection as the LDP’s leader in late September.

Noda said the dissolution will be contingent on the LDP’s support for a package of measures to issue deficit-covering bonds this week, but the LDP seemed likely to support that package in any event.

The election will affect at least a half-dozen key policy issues, including relations with China, Japan’s pacifist constitution, a controversial sales tax increase set to go into effect in 2014, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement with other Asian countries and the United States, the future role of nuclear energy and fiscal policy in a country that’s seen low GDP growth since the 1980s.

Noda’s announcement was so striking because he needed to call an election only before August 2013, but currently, a record-high 64% of Japanese voters disapprove of his government, with just 18% approving.

Since the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ, or 民主党, Minshutō) took control of Japan’s parliament after the 2009 elections, things haven’t gone so well for them — the party has gone through three different prime ministers in three years. Continue reading Japan heads to snap elections on December 16 →

Basque Country, China

The role of women in the CCP: just so much ‘beautiful scenery’?

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The 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党) concluded today, but the photo above comes from a plucky photo essay at China People’s Daily, entitled ‘Beautiful Scenery,’ and depicts 14 photos of women delighting at various moments during the Congress.

As stated in the slideshow: ‘beautiful ritual girls, female reporters and delegates to the Party congress become beautiful scenery during the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.’

Hat tip goes to Kathleen McLaughin, who’s been keeping a daily diary of the Congress for Foreign Policy, and who argues that gender disparity in China is perhaps getting worse, not better:

While 521 women serve as delegates in this party congress — 23 percent of the total, up from 18 percent a decade ago and higher than the 20 percent that women make up in the U.S. Senate — the members of China’s ceremonial electorate have far less influence over the process than their U.S. counterparts.

Gender discrimination often seems to be getting worse in China: Although a large percentage of Chinese women are employed (70 percent, compared with 25 percent in India), urban Chinese women earn about 67 percent of what men make, according to a 2010 survey from the All-China Women’s Federation. This summer, women in Guangzhou shaved their heads in protest of growing discriminatory policies around the country that require girls to score higher than boys on college entrance exams.

The Party hasn’t historically been incredibly welcoming to women, and in its history, it has yet to elevate a single woman to the Politburo Standing Committee, the chief governing body of the Party (and, accordingly, the Chinese government).  The members of the Politburo Standing Committee are likely to be announced by the end of this week.

One woman with an outside chance of being named to the Politburo Standing Committee is Liu Yandong (刘延东), who’s been a member of the Politburo (the only woman currently serving on the Politburo) since 2007 and who has served as a state councilor since 2008.  Liu (pictured immediately above) is a ‘princeling,’ as her father is Liu Ruilong, a former vice minister of agriculture, and she’s been close to outgoing Chinese leader Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) for three decades — notably, they worked together with the Party’s youth league in the 1980s.     Continue reading The role of women in the CCP: just so much ‘beautiful scenery’? →

China

Fifth Generation: Who is Wang Qishan?

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This is the fifth in a series of posts examining the Chinese leaders expected to be named to the Politburo Standing Committee during the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党) that kicked off November 8.  Prior installments on Zhang Gaoli here, Zhang Dejiang here, Liu Yunshan here and Yu Zhengsheng here.

Of all the potential new members of the Politburo Standing Committee, no one has a more assured spot than Wang Qishan (王岐山), who is expected to be the economic policy supremo of the next generation of leadership of the People’s Republic of China.

The only question is whether he’ll be elevated to executive vice premier under the likely new PRC premier, Li Keqiang (李克强), which had seemed likelier earlier in the summer and autumn, but now seems more uncertain, according to party sources.

The Congress concluded on Wednesday, with the Politburo Standing Committee members to be named today or tomorrow.

Wang, age 64, has served as the vice premier for economic, energy and financial affairs since 2007, when he became a Politburo member as well.

Previously, from 1989 to 1997, he was vice governor, then governor of the China Construction Bank, one of the world’s largest banks and indeed one of the world’s largest corporations.  As vice governor of Guangdong province in 2007, he was instrumental in the liquidation of the Guangdong International Trust and Investment Company, which, according to Robert Lawrence Kuhn in How China’s Leaders Think, signaled to the world that China was serious about developing market mechanisms that could bring discipline to the financial sector.

As such, he developed keen ties with former leader Jiang Zemin (江泽民), but his real patron among the older leadership is Jiang’s former premier, Zhu Ronghi (朱镕基), who, before his elevation to the premiership in 1998, served as vice premier and as the governor of China’s central bank (Wang served a brief stint as vice governor there as well).

Wang served as the Party chairman of Hainan province — the tropical island at the south of the Chinese mainland that stylizes itself as China’s Hawaii — from 2002 to 2003.  Hainan is, itself, an interesting story of Chinese internal growth — formerly part of Guangdong province until 1988, China’s leaders separated Hainan as its own province and designated it a ‘special economic area.’  Despite being seen as something of an economic backwater for centuries, its economy has grown in leaps and bounds, even by Chinese standards, in the past decade, and China hopes to transform it into an international tourism destination within the next decade.

He thereupon served as the mayor of Beijing from 2003 to 2007 and handled much of the preparation for the city’s hosting of the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Kuhn reports that Wang is a humorous and sophisticated rising star:

When the Olympics was approaching, a distinguished American financier asked for [Wang’s] business card.  “You won’t need my card,” Wang, then Beijing mayor, said with a smile. “If the Olympics is successful,” he joked, “I’ll be too high to help you — and if it’s not successful, I won’t have a phone!”

Wang, perhaps more than Li, China’s current ‘paramount leader,’ president and Party general secretary Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) or the expected new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping (习近平), is at ease with the international media — check out his interview with U.S. secretary of state Tim Geithner and Charlie Rose.  So Wang will likely have a major role to play in U.S. foreign relations as well, especially given the key economic issues involved in the U.S.-China relationship.

Named to the Time 100 in 2009, Wang was greeted with glowing praise from former U.S. treasury secretary Henry Paulson: Continue reading Fifth Generation: Who is Wang Qishan? →

Australia, United States

Photo of the day: Mirth in Perth

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From Australian prime minister Julia Gillard comes this wonderful photo of her with U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton and U.S. secretary of defense Leon Panetta, who seem to have been all mirth last night.  A pity that Kevin Rudd missed all the fun. 

The U.S. officials are in Perth this week for mutual defense talks with Australia, where the United States is looking to increase its military operations, including U.S. access to air bases in northern Australia and the use of Perth’s naval base for U.S. warships — giving the U.S. navy easier access to the Indian Ocean.

And Andrew Moravcsik still doesn’t believe in the pivot to Asia?

Nigeria, Sierra Leone

Obasanjo’s endorsement in Sierra Leone: will it help or hurt?

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Nigeria is the regional anchor of West Africa, with a rapidly growing population of 164 million people and easily West Africa’s largest economy — an economy set to overtake South Africa’s economy by 2020. 

So when former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo made an endorsement in the contested presidential race in Sierra Leone, a country of just around five million people, people took notice.

Obasanjo endorsed Sierra Leone’s incumbent president, Ernest Bai Koroma (pictured above, right, with Obasanjo, left), last week.  So what does that mean for Sierra Leone’s elections to be held this Sunday, November 17?

Probably not much.

As Andrew Novak has recently written for Suffragio, Koroma, the candidate of the All People’s Congress (APC), remains a slight favorite against his chief opponent, Julius Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP).  The SLPP was formed in 1951 and dominated Sierra Leonean politics immediately before, during and after Sierra Leone’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1961.  The APC, formed in 1960, dominated an increasingly autocratic and corrupt Sierra Leonean government through the early 1990s, when Sierra Leone descended into one of Africa’s bloodiest civil wars.  The Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a rebel group backed by Liberian strongman Charles Taylor plunged Sierra Leone into a chaotic war that featured the use of child soldiers and other horrific war crimes, mostly fought over control of Sierra Leone’s diamond mines in Kono.

The SLPP’s Ahmad Tejan Kabbah won power in 1996 during the height of the fighting and despite Kabbah’s inability to govern, he won reelection overwhelming in 2002, the same year that Sierra Leone’s civil war ended.  The SLPP lost power in 2007 — Kabbah’s vice president Solomon Berewa lost to Koroma, and despite some tensions, Kabbah peacefully transferred power to Koroma.  The SLPP’s current candidate, Bio, led a coup in 1996 and actually served as Sierra Leone’s president for a short while that year before his government called the elections that Kabbah ultimately won.

Historically, the Temne ethnic group, based in the north, has supported the APC and, indeed, Koroma is Sierra Leone’s first Tenme president.  In contrast, the Mende ethnic group in the south has traditionally supported the SLPP.

It seems more likely that Obasanjo is less interested in swaying Sierra Leonean voters than in ingratiating himself with the president of a country that has recently discovered new offshore petroleum deposits and remains one of the largest diamond-mining countries in the world, although proceeds from diamond mining were long used to fuel lavish personal spending from the 1960s and the 1990s and control of Sierra Leone’s diamond wealth fueled so much of the country’s civil war that Sierra Leone is often said to have suffered from a ‘diamond curse.’  So new discoveries of oil in Sierra Leone have been welcomed, but cautiously so.

Although Obasanjo has been out of office since 2007, he still plays an outsized role in African politics, both at home in Nigeria and abroad, including as a peacekeeping envoy for the United Nations to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Continue reading Obasanjo’s endorsement in Sierra Leone: will it help or hurt? →

China, Tibet

Amid the CCP handover of power to Xi Jinping, ethnic Tibetan issue remains a thorny problem

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The first thing you notice about Qinghai province is that it’s rather desolate — more Utah than Alaska, and the first thing you notice about Rebkong is that it’s a dusty town far away from even the provincial capital.  A world away from the center of Qinghai, itself a world away from Beijing.

I visited Rebkong in April earlier this year with an American friend based at the time in Shanghai, along with Xining (Qinghai’s capital) and other spots in Qinghai province, which lies in the northwest of the People’s Republic of China.  Just a couple of hours away from Beijing by air, Qinghai is indeed a world away, lying as it does on the far east of the Tibetan plateau.  With just 5.6 million people, the province contains just a handful of China’s trillion-plus population — the only province with fewer people is Tibet proper, with around 3 million.

We went to Qinghai, frankly, because getting PRC approval for the permits and guides to visit Tibet province has become such an incredible hassle since the 2008 Tibetan protests.  A kind of ‘Tibet without Tibet.’ But that was probably too twee a slogan, because Qinghai — known historically to Tibetans as Amdo — is as much Tibetan as what lies within the PRC boundaries of the Tibetan ‘autonomous region.’

The region (Amdo or Qinghai, as you like) has been under Chinese control since it was secured by the Qing dynasty in 1724.  It’s home to several important Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, including Kumbum monastery (སྐུ་འབུམ་བྱམས་པ་གླིང།, or ‘Ta’er si’ in Mandarin Chinese, 塔尔寺), founded in 1577 on the site of the birthplace of Tsongkhapa, an important figure in the development of Buddhism and the founder of the Gelug (‘yellow-hat’) school of Buddhism — its importance to Tibetan buddhism is second only to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital.  Indeed, what we know as ‘Tibet’ today is really just the western part of the historic Tibetan empire, which included not just Amdo, but Kham, which is now the western part of Sichuan province in the PRC. So we were delighted to see a corner of greater Tibet not already fawned over by Richard Gere and so many others.

Xining itself is a mix of Muslims (Hui Chinese), Tibetans and Han Chinese, but outside the capital, Qinghai is indisputably Tibetan, and it’s the birthplace of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.

After a night in Xining quaffing barley wine at the local Tibetan bar, we found a local guide who agreed to show us around for the next couple of days, beyond just a quick trip to Kumbum, but a true journey into the Tibetan hinterland.  We started our days with tsampa, a high-power concoction of yak butter and barley flour (it reminded me of a buttery version of the energy gels you eat during marathons), gorged ourselves on momo (yak-meat dumplings) and snacked on fresh yak-milk yogurt in between visiting monasteries, such as Rgolung (Youning si’ in Chinese), which nestles upon a handful of ledges in the cliffs of eastern Qinghai province.

As it so happens, our young, kind guide was from Rebkong, so we spent a night there, and we saw the monastery, Rongwo (pictured above, center and bottom), where he studied as a child and young adult, and we saw the square just outside, Dolma Square (pictured above, top).

That square has become a center of the latest Tibetan protest against the governing Chinese regime when 18-year-old Kalsang Jinpa lit himself on fire [graphic photos] there, one of six Tibetans in the past week to die in a wave of self-immolations in protest of Chinese rule.  The situation in Rebkong is becoming tense, according to reports [graphic photos], with 20-year old Nyingchag Bum self-immolating Monday:  Continue reading Amid the CCP handover of power to Xi Jinping, ethnic Tibetan issue remains a thorny problem →

China

Fifth Generation: Who is Yu Zhengsheng?

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This is the fourth in a series of posts examining the Chinese leaders expected to be named to the Politburo Standing Committee during the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党) that kicked off November 8.  Prior installments on Zhang Gaoli here, Zhang Dejiang here and Liu Yunshan here.

Today, we continue our look at the expected members of the Party’s new Politburo Standing Committee with Yu Zhengsheng (俞正声), currently the Party secretary of Shanghai municipality — where he presided over the citywide expo in 2010 — and a Politburo member since 2002.

Yu’s elevation — if true — to the Standing Committee would seem to be a victory for the conservative elite — he’s a ‘princeling,’ a cautious economic reformer  at best, and close to former leader Deng Xiaoping and former leader Jiang Zemin (江泽民).  With the Congress likely to reduce the number of Standing Committee members from nine to seven, his inclusion would mean the exclusion of the relatively more reformist Party secretary of Guangdong province, Wang Yang (汪洋) and the leader of the Party’s organization department, Li Yuanchao (李源潮) — Wang, and especially Li, are considered protégés of the outgoing general secretary, president and ‘paramount leader,’ Hu Jintao (胡锦涛).

He served as the Party’s minister of construction from 1998 to 2001.

From 2002 to 2007, he was the Party secretary in Hubei province, a province of over 57 million people in central China, home to the Three Gorges Dam.

Cheng Li, director of research and a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center, notes in his profile of Yu his ‘extraordinary family background’: Continue reading Fifth Generation: Who is Yu Zhengsheng? →

Assorted Links

First Past the Post: November 12

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Greece finally passes its 2013 national budget with 167 votes, though the deal will have left the center-left PASOK with even fewer MPs after seven refused to vote for the deal.

Rice and politics in Thailand.

Former justice minister Angelino Alfano narrowly leads Rome mayor Gianni Alemanno to be the Italian center-right’s candidate for prime minister.

Meanwhile, current Democratic Party leader Pier Luigi Bersani and Florence mayor Matteo Renzi are essentially tied in advance of primaries later this month.

More context in Sierra Leone’s election later this week.

A new Nutella tax in France?

The new ‘purple’ coalition in the Netherlands is plummeting in popularity over a plan to make health premiums income-dependent. [First link in Dutch]

Rafael Correa will, as expected, run for reelection as Ecuador’s president next spring.

Germany’s Green Party gets new leadership.

What the effects of Scottish independence would mean for the remaining UK.

The campaign has begun in advance of Romania’s Dec. 9 general election.

Ukraine’s opposition begrudgingly accepts their loss in the Oct. 28 parliamentary elections.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Prince Mohammed’s elevation to interior minister augurs start of generational change

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Although Suffragio covers mostly countries where democratic elections feature prominently in national politics, this month’s Chinese transition reminds us that although some countries do not have elections, they most certainly have politics.

That’s true in Saudi Arabia, where last week we saw the signs of the first transition of power to a new generation, the grandchildren of Ibn Saud — or King Abdulaziz — with the elevation of Prince Mohammed bin Nayef as interior minister on November 5.

The current Saudi king, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, is Abdulaziz’s 10th son, and has governed since 2005, but has really effectively been the de facto Saudi leader since the previous king’s stroke in 1995.  The current Saudi crown prince (heir to the throne) is Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Abdulaziz’s 25th son.

Prince Mohammed (pictured above) replaces Ahmed bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, himself Abdulaziz’s 31st son (allegedly!).

But Abdullah is 88 years old, Salman a relatively sprightly 75 years old, and Ahmed is 70, and the once-thriving set of Abdulaziz’s sons has thinned over the years, leading to increased speculation about how the next generation of the House of Saud will begin to assume power.  The next generation of Saudi leadership will face huge challenges, not least of which how to provide employment opportunities to young Saudis, deal with calls for political reform in the era of the ‘Arab Spring,’ and diversify an economy that remains too dependent on oil — and that’s before the trickier foreign policy issues presented by a United States that will brook no further Saudi-grown terrorist attacks, a Yemen at the south of the Arabian peninsula that’s becoming a chaotic terrorist haven, and Syria, a close Saudi ally, descend further into a bloody civil war.

Prince Mohammed had served as assistant interior minister since 1999, and he’s made headlines as a relatively modern Saudi royal — U.S. and other officials have applauded his efforts in attacking home-grown terrorism within Saudi Arabia, and he was in 2009 himself injured in a suicide attack.  he’s seen as somewhat more reformist than the current ruling generation, but no one really knows where his true passions lie.

The director of the Eurasia Group‘s Middle East practice, Crispin Hawes wrote in Foreign Policy on Friday that the move may presage the elevation of Khalid Al Faisal Al Saud, a son of the late King Faisal, to become second deputy prime minister and accordingly, second in line to the throne (after Salman, the crown prince):

Abdullah seems intent on defining a long-term plan for the succession in an effort to prevent the kingdom from instability if, as is possible, there is a rapid series of deaths among the current and elderly ruling generation. The transition to the generation of Mohammed and Khaled al-Faisal, grandsons of Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud and modern Saudi Arabia’s founder, has been the subject of speculation for years. Faisal is in his early 70s, only a few years younger than Salman, but the move is a very significant one.

Prince Khalid is currently the governor of Mecca province, Saudi Arabia’s most populous province and the home of its chief port Jeddah (and of, course, the great pilgrimage city of Mecca itself).  Like Prince Mohammed, Khalid enjoys favor from both conservative and relatively liberal members of the House of Saud.

Some background is in order, because the Saudi succession is a complex business.

King Abdulaziz, then still known as just Ibn Saud, first conquered Riyadh (the homeland of the Saud family) in 1902.  He fought in concert with the Allied powers during World War I against the Ottoman Empire (which controlled Arabia at the beginning of the 20th century), and consolidated power in 1932 to create the modern state we know today as Saudi Arabia.  As such, Ibn Saud / King Abdulaziz is generally accepted as the founder of the current kingdom.  With the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938, and the wide-scale extraction of oil beginning in the 1940s, the Saudi grip over the Arabian peninsula has been relatively secure, financed by vast oil wealth, and since Abdulaziz’s death, each successive Saudi king has been one of his many, many sons — at least 37 and possibly 45 or more.

Abdulaziz’s kingdom has been ruled by one of his many sons to this day, which means that the Saudi leadership has become increasingly geriatric.  Continue reading Saudi Prince Mohammed’s elevation to interior minister augurs start of generational change →

China

Fifth Generation: Who is Liu Yunshan?

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This is the third in a series of posts examining the Chinese leaders expected to be named to the Politburo Standing Committee during the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党) that kicked off November 8.  Prior installments on Zhang Gaoli here and Zhang Dejiang here.

Liu Yunshun  (刘云山), more than almost any other person in the People’s Republic of China, is responsible for the execution of the so-called ‘Great Firewall’ — that mix of controls that censors access to the Internet within China.

This isn’t a history of the ‘Great Firewall,’ but if you haven’t, go read James Fallows’s essential piece on Internet censorship in China in The Atlantic, and you’ll start to understand why Liu is a natural choice for elevation to the Politburo Standing Committee.  As Fallows writes, there’s really not one ‘Great Firewall,’ but a sophisticated systems of controls.  Internet-based data comes to China via three major choke points: from Japan to Beijing/Tianjin, from Japan to Shanghai, and from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, making it easier for China to censor information coming into the country with a number of technologically-enabled strategies.  Furthermore, although the system is relatively easily circumvented by a proxy server or, to better effect, with a virtual private network (VPN), few Chinese citizens can afford or seem willing to go through the hassle of circumventing the ‘Great Firewall.’

Liu (pictured above), aged 65, has been a Politburo member since 2002, and since 2007, he been the director of the Party’s propaganda department, and so the PRC’s chief official responsible for propaganda and censorship.

He’s vice chair of the Party’s splendidly euphemistic Central Guidance Commission for Building Spiritual Civilization, which essentially controls the Party’s propaganda department, currently chaired by outgoing Politburo Standing Committee member Li Changchun — Liu is expected to succeed Li upon his ascension to the Politburo Standing Committee as the PRC’s top ‘propaganda czar,’ where he is expected to continue the Party’s strict controls over media and Internet censorship.

Liu’s background is unique in three ways. Continue reading Fifth Generation: Who is Liu Yunshan? →

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